[After World War II, the Indonesian Communist Party threw itself
into democratic politics and outreach to broad segments of society.
Western intelligence agencies were worried because they knew that the
PKI was not coercing people into giving them power — they were
simply growing in popularity.]
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THE COLD WAR WAS NEVER ABOUT DEMOCRACY  
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Vincent Bevins, Loren Balhorn
March 27, 2023
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
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_ After World War II, the Indonesian Communist Party threw itself
into democratic politics and outreach to broad segments of society.
Western intelligence agencies were worried because they knew that the
PKI was not coercing people into giving them power — they were
simply growing in popularity. _

Masses of supporters at an election rally for the Communist Party of
Indonesia, 1955, Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine appears to mark the definitive end of
the post-Cold War order. The attack has reinvigorated a once seemingly
“braindead” NATO, which has demonstrated remarkable unity in
enacting sanctions against Russia and supplying Ukraine with billions
of dollars of weapons to defend itself, and helped the United States
to overcome the stain of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile,
Moscow is reaching out to China, India, and other allies in the name
of building a “multipolar” world free of US domination — and
leaving the West more isolated than ever.

In the face of this widening geopolitical gulf, a number of
commentators have invoked the spectre of a “new Cold War” in which
the West, led by Washington, defends the principles of freedom and
democracy against creeping authoritarianism around the world. The
United States and NATO may not be perfect, they argue, but, as was the
case last century, are infinitely preferable to the dictatorships on
the other side of the new Iron Curtain.

Comforting as such a teleological view of history may be, one of its
many problems is that it fundamentally misconstrues who the aggressor
in the Cold War actually was. For most of the world, the first four
decades after World War II were characterized not by the struggle
between socialism and capitalism or the US and the Soviet Union, but
by a global anticommunist crusade to strangle any and all attempts at
democracy and national sovereignty outside the narrow bounds permitted
by the American foreign policy establishment.

Vincent Bevins’s 2020 book, _The Jakarta Method: Washington’s
Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our
World_
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which appeared in German
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January of this year,_ _is an insightful and original history of that
era. Beginning with the Indonesian genocide in the mid-1960s, when the
Indonesian Army slaughtered over 1 million Communists with US backing
and plunged the country into decades of dictatorship, he lays out the
West’s global campaign of violence during the Cold War and how it
shaped the world we live in today.

Yet, _The Jakarta Method_ is more than just another litany of
atrocities — it’s an empathetic engagement with the hopes and
dreams of a generation that lived through these events. Vincent Bevins
sat down with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Loren Balhorn to talk
anticommunist violence, German complicity, and the dream of another
world that violence sought to suffocate.

YOU’VE COVERED INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AS A JOURNALIST FOR YEARS.
WHAT COMPELLED YOU TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR?

I arrived in Jakarta in 2017 to write about Southeast Asia for
the _Washington Post_ — standard mainstream journalism for a big
US outlet. Yet, I found that wherever I looked, whatever I tried to
do, this big, untold story lurked right beneath the surface. You could
not do the job of correspondent without looking at the tragedy and
unresolved trauma of the 1965 mass murder in Indonesia.

Since I had experience in Latin America, knew the languages, and had
sources, I thought one way to approach the event was from a global
perspective. The more I looked at it in that way, the more I became
convinced that it was one of the most pivotal events of the twentieth
century.

YOUR STORY CENTRES ON WHAT YOU CALL THE “JAKARTA METHOD” OF US
FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DECADES AFTER WORLD WAR II. WHAT WAS THAT METHOD
EXACTLY AND HOW DID IT SPREAD AROUND THE WORLD?

What I call the “Jakarta Method” is the intentional mass murder of
leftists or people accused of being leftists, usually in the service
of the construction of authoritarian capitalist regimes, and usually
carried out with some degree of support from the North Atlantic
powers. The phrase “Jakarta Method” is actually a translation of
several terms in Portuguese and Spanish — _Operação
Jacarta_, _Plan Yakarta_, or just _Djakarta_ — that were used by
far-right movements allied with Washington in the Cold War.

Quite simply, they learned about what happened in Indonesia and took
inspiration from it. This process was facilitated by a robust network
of anticommunist organizations around the world. In the second half of
the twentieth century, I found at least 23 countries in which this
kind of mass murder was carried out.

YOU WRITE IN THE BOOK THAT INDONESIA AND THE EVENTS THAT HAPPENED
THERE IN THE MID-1960S CONSTITUTE A “HUGE GAP IN OUR COLLECTIVE
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE, EVEN AMONG PEOPLE WHO DO KNOW A LITTLE ABOUT THE
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, OR THE KOREAN WAR, OR POL POT”. WHY IS THAT?

Well, in the dominant narrative, especially here in the North
Atlantic, the Cold War happened between the First and Second Worlds.
But if you care about every human being on the planet — and recent
scholarship like Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s work has
increasingly taken this position, too — the Cold War more properly
took place between the First and Third World, with the First World as
the aggressor.

Approximately 1 million people were killed in Indonesia — now the
world’s fourth-largest country by population, and the world’s
largest Muslim-majority country. A leading country of the progressive
non-aligned Third World Movement flipped from the anti-imperialist,
left-leaning camp to the solidly anticommunist, pro-Western camp and
the largest unarmed socialist party on the planet was destroyed
basically overnight. It was a very big deal.

To answer the question of how this process of historical forgetting
took place, we have to give multiple answers. One is that the Suharto
dictatorship that rose to power was very successful in consolidating
its regime and imposing its own version of history. Another is that
Vietnam came to dominate Cold War politics in Asia, at least in the
popular Western imagination, because our attention to faraway regions
is often limited and because it became a domestic issue in the United
States. At the time, however, everyone in the US foreign policy
establishment agreed that Indonesia was more important than Vietnam.

Finally — and this is the most difficult answer to confront — I
think that the truth of what happened contradicts so violently our
perceived notions of how globalization took shape, of how our current
order was created, that it has been easier to simply ignore it.

THERE’S A GREAT SCENE IN THE BOOK WHERE INDIA’S FIRST PRIME
MINISTER, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, TELLS A YOUNG JOHN F. KENNEDY THAT
COMMUNISM GAVE THE PEOPLE OF THE THIRD WORLD “SOMETHING TO DIE
FOR”. HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND COMMUNISM’S GLOBAL APPEAL AT THAT
TIME? WHAT DID IT MEAN TO CITIZENS OF POSTCOLONIAL NATIONS, AND HOW
DEEPLY DID THESE IDEAS PENETRATE INTO THE WIDER POPULATION?

To a large extent, _The Jakarta Method_ is about the dream of the
world that so many people believed was possible in the 1950s and
1960s, and what happened to it. In Indonesia, for example, we know
from declassified CIA and MI6 files that both of these organizations
believed that, if free and fair elections were to take place after
1958, the — moderate and unarmed — Communist Party of Indonesia,
or PKI, would have won.

Communism had significant appeal in the Global South after
decolonization, and Marxist-Leninist forces often played a crucial
role in the fight for independence. This was the case in Indonesia,
where the national liberation movement often consisted of an alliance
of Communist, Muslim, and nationalist forces.

Not only did the Communist organizational model offer a very handy way
to carry out the national liberation struggle, but the example of the
Soviet Union offered a possible path to actually catch up with the
economies of the First World — something that happened in almost no
Global South country that stayed in the so-called “Free World”,
the group of pro-Western capitalist nations, whether they chose to
join, or were violently forced into it. Obviously, if Communism did
not have such wide appeal in the Third World, there would have been no
need to fight it so relentlessly, and there would be no “Red
China”, or socialist Vietnam, etc.

COMMUNIST PARTIES OUTSIDE EUROPE WERE OFTEN QUITE SMALL OUTFITS,
DEPENDENT ON THEIR LINKS TO MOSCOW. INDONESIA, ON THE OTHER HAND, HAD
A REAL MASS PARTY WITH AN INDEPENDENT POLITICAL LINE. HOW DID THE PKI
EMERGE AND WHAT CONDITIONS ENABLED COMMUNISM TO BECOME SUCH A POWERFUL
FORCE THERE?

Sometimes that was the case, sometimes it was not. Not in China, for
example, and the Indonesian Communist Party is older than the Chinese
Communist Party. The PKI is older than the Russian Revolution.

The PKI had deep roots in the independence movement, and after a brief
power struggle within the revolutionary war, when the Dutch tried to
re-conquer the archipelago after World War II, just as France tried to
re-conquer Vietnam, the Indonesian Communist Party threw itself into
democratic politics and outreach to broad segments of society.

The party wasn’t only powerful within the budding workers’
movement and popular with small-scale farmers, they also had
incredibly popular cultural organizations — they might put on the
most interesting entertainment in your village, depending on where you
lived — and a massive women’s organization, the “Gerwani”.
That may have been one of the largest feminist organizations in the
world at the time, and were singled out for special hatred and
accusations by the insurgent anticommunist forces in 1965.

Again, declassified Western documentation is revealing. In the 1950s,
Western intelligence agencies were worried precisely because they knew
that the PKI was not tricking or coercing people into giving them
power — they were seen as the least corrupt party, and were simply
growing in popularity. The PKI leadership, for their part, thought
their popularity would be enough to protect them.

WE KNOW ABOUT THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED BY THE US AND ITS PROXIES IN
VIETNAM AND CHILE, BUT YOU ARGUE THAT MOST OF THE WORLD REMAINS
OBLIVIOUS TO THE EXTENT OF THE VIOLENCE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA IN
PARTICULAR. DID YOU FIND ANYTHING PARTICULAR SHOCKING WHILE WRITING
THE BOOK?

In Bali, for example. This island was probably home to the worst mass
murder, at least on a per capita basis. Perhaps 5 percent of Balinese
people were killed.

Locals there now interact with all kinds of foreign tourists who fancy
themselves quite knowledgeable about international affairs and may
have visited the killing fields in Cambodia on an earlier stop on the
backpacking trail. But in Bali, they often stay in beach resorts
literally built on mass graves. Balinese locals report that these
kinds of tourists almost never have any idea what happened on that
island.

YOU PAINT A PICTURE OF A COHERENT ANTICOMMUNIST AGENDA BY THE 1950S,
BROADLY SHARED BY US ELITES AND THEIR GLOBAL ALLIES, DETERMINED TO
POLITICALLY — AND, IF NECESSARY, PHYSICALLY — NEUTRALIZE SOCIALIST
AND OTHER PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS AROUND THE WORLD. GIVEN HOW MUCH
WEAKER THE LEFT HAS BECOME SINCE, DOES ANTICOMMUNISM AS AN IDEOLOGY
HAVE ANY INFLUENCE OR USE TODAY?

I think it has influence precisely because it is useful.
Take _Bolsonarismo_, for example, an ideology that returned with
violent force to Brazil, where I have mostly lived since 2010.
Deploying the fantastical threat of some kind of possible rebellion
from below, stirring up fear of an internal enemy, has not gone away
because it works. Far-right movements from Asia to Europe to the
Americas reach for these ideological remnants because they are
effective.

YOUR BOOK SHOWS HOW THE US AND, TO A LESSER EXTENT, THE USSR SOUGHT TO
INFLUENCE AND DIRECTLY INTERVENE IN THE PROCESS OF DECOLONIZATION,
WITH STRUGGLES FOR INDEPENDENCE AT RISK OF BECOMING “PROXY WARS”
FOR ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER. WHAT DOES YOUR BOOK TELL US ABOUT HOW GREAT
POWER RIVALRIES AND REGIONAL CONFLICTS INTERACT?

The largest lesson that emerges for me is that, in 1945, the US found
itself by far the most powerful country in the world. Foreign policy
officials in Washington looked out on a world system that had been
shaped by centuries of formal European colonization. At that point,
the relatively young nation seemed to be at a crossroads: was it going
to remain true to its putative revolutionary and anti-colonial ideals,
or would it fall back on practices more in line with its own
imperialist expansion across North America?

It may seem now that it would always take the second path, but leaders
like Sukarno and even Ho Chi Minh didn’t know which way Washington
was going to go. They appealed to Washington hoping to build
friendship. I think the “Jakarta Method” is only one of many tools
and tactics it developed in the second half of the twentieth century
to shape outcomes in the Global South, and maintain the same general
relations between North and South that had been shaped by colonialism,
without recourse to formal colonial control.

ANOTHER MAJOR THEATRE OF YOUR BOOK IS THE 1964 MILITARY COUP IN
BRAZIL, AN ERA THAT JAIR BOLSONARO CELEBRATES AS A “VERY GOOD”
TIME IN THE COUNTRY’S HISTORY. HOW GRAVE IS THE THREAT TO BRAZILIAN
DEMOCRACY TODAY GIVEN EVENTS LIKE THE RIOT BY BOLSONARO SUPPORTERS IN
THE CAPITAL ON 8 JANUARY? COULD THE JAKARTA METHOD MAKE A COMEBACK?

One of Jair Bolsonaro’s most famous declarations before his arrival
as a real electoral force in 2016–2018 was to say that the
dictatorship had not killed enough people, and that Brazil could only
advance as a country if it killed tens of thousands more. Now, of
course, he did not manage to actually consolidate dictatorial control,
for a number of reasons that I outlined last year in the _New York
Review of Books_
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but he certainly represents the return of the Cold-War-era, violently
anticommunist ideological project. What happened on 8 January was one
clear sign of what was already obvious
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his final election loss: _Bolsonarismo _will continue to be a
political force, even without Jair Bolsonaro in the presidency.

YOU’VE DONE A NUMBER OF EVENTS IN GERMANY OVER THE LAST FEW WEEKS
HIGHLIGHTING WEST GERMANY’S COMPLICITY IN THE MASSACRES. DOES THE
GERMAN GOVERNMENT HARBOUR SOME GUILT FOR WHAT HAPPENED BACK THEN?

Some of the Indonesian death squads were inspired by Nazism.
Nevertheless, I focused primarily on the role of the United States —
we now know that the Indonesian Army did what it did to a large extent
because of US influence. Washington supplied material support, crucial
encouragement, and one embassy employee later admitted that the US
government handed over lists to the Indonesians of people to be
killed.

West German documents now indicate that the government knew what was
going on from the beginning — one Indonesian general requested
financ
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help
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Bonn to help carry out anticommunist operations during the massacre,
and one former SS officer, in Indonesia since 1959, helped to
promote Suharto’s image abroad.

I have been honoured that Sri Tunruang from the International
People’s Tribunal has supported the launch of the book in Germany,
and that the very large Indonesian survivor community has helped so
much. This week, Sri Tunruang and I will present testimony in the
German parliament at the invitation of the Committee on Human Rights
and Humanitarian Aid. My concern is not with assigning blame or even
really with Germany at all. What matters is to me is that the vast
majority of the survivor community in Indonesia and their tens of
millions of relatives have all been denied any kind of justice. There
has never even been recognition that what happened to them was not
their fault.

Very unlike the situation in Latin America, there has never been
anything like a Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Indonesia. There
is still a “Museum of Communist Treachery” in central Jakarta. The
survivor community badly needs support — most survivors live in
poverty and marginalized from society, still stigmatized by the
accusations hurled at them in 1965–66. During the pandemic, we often
turned to raising money on Twitter to pay for things like rice and
basic medical care for people who spent much of their lives in
concentration camps.

My focus for the book was on the role of the US, but I want to push as
widely as possible for recognition of what happened. If Germany can
come out and be more honest about what happened behind the scenes in
that horrible period, it might put more pressure on other governments
like the US, Indonesia, and Britain to move closer towards something
like transparency, and that could matter to quite a lot of people.

YOUR BOOK EMPHASIZES HOW LITTLE MOST PEOPLE IN THE WEST KNOW ABOUT THE
VIOLENCE INFLICTED ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY. DO YOU THINK WE, I.E. PEOPLE LIVING IN THE COUNTRIES THAT
“WON” THE COLD WAR, HAVE A KIND OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO LEARN
MORE ABOUT THIS HISTORY?

I suppose that no one has a responsibility to learn about anything
these days, but I would not point to guilt or moral duty as a reason
to study these phenomena. There are far better reasons. If you want to
understand where this global system actually comes from and you are
interested in analysing the ways that it can be changed, you have to
understand how these processes worked. In that sense, learning about
them is not only interesting from a historical point of view, it
empowers us to better act upon the world as it currently exists.

_Vincent Bevins reported on Southeast Asia for the Washington
Post after working as Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles
Times and the Financial Times. The Jakarta Method is his first
book._

_Loren Balhorn is Lead Editor, rosalux.org, Rosa-Luxemburg-StiftuNG_

_The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is one of the six major political
foundations in the Federal Republic of Germany, tasked primarily with
conducting political education both at home and abroad. The foundation
is closely linked to Die Linke, a democratic socialist party in the
German parliament._

_Since its founding in 1990, the foundation’s work has adhered to
the legacy of its namesake, German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg,
and stands for democratic socialism with an unwavering
internationalist focus. The foundation is committed to a radical
perspective emphasizing public awareness, education, and social
critique. It stands in the tradition of the workers’ and women’s
movements, as well as anti-fascism and anti-racism._

* Indonesia
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* military coup
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* Anti-Communism
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* Cold War
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